WIRED's biggest stories, delivered to your inbox

High-Tech Snowflakes: A Biochemist’s Homegrown Snow

Snowflakes at Last?

After a few weeks of toying with temperature gradients, moisture levels, electricity and other aspects of his snowflake grower, Gledhill finally achieved snowflake-like growth at the tips of ice spikes.

While not the ideal shape Gledhill originally envisioned, he said the forms were good enough to proceed with shooting Ryan Teague's music video (for the song "Cascades"). "As long as I can grow beautiful crystals, it really doesn't matter," Gledhill said.

This past weekend Gledhill and Tozer took thousands of photos of growing ice crystals. Gledhill thinks the footage will take a couple months to edit into a finished time-lapse music video, which Craig Ward is directing.

"It's a lot of fun to record this process, which is invisible to the average person," Gledhill said. "The ability to show that to people in an artistic way brings me a lot of joy."

Tubular Growth

When Gledhill left his snowflake grower on overnight, it formed many of these hollow ice cones and needles.

"In biopharmaceuticals, it takes probably 10 years to develop and test a compound, and your probability of success is very low," Gledhill said.

"I began growing ice crystals in a couple of weeks and saw the rewards immediately, even when I failed," he said. "It's a welcome mental distraction from laborious work."

Electric Ice Crystals

Armed with 2,000 volts, Gledhill improved his snowflake-maker further by tweaking its moisture supply with acetic acid and a warm water bubbler similar to equipment used in fishtanks.

The spindly structure below, which is about an inch long, grew in 30 seconds. After several hours they build crystals like the one above.

Amped-Up Snowmaker

Water is a conductive medium, so adding electricity can radically change the formation of water's crystalline forms. Gledhill's solution: a $30 power supply intended for electrified fences (above), which gave him 2,000 volts of electric potential.

The crystals he subsequently created took on spire-like shapes (below) with the beginnings of snowflakes on the ends.

Beautiful Failures

Gledhill initially started growing ice crystals on a damp cloth string and nylon fishing line. His chamber worked, but produced the wrong kinds of crystals.

As he tweaked and improved his machine, Gledhill began growing thick dendritic crystals, which formed both on the string (above) and the cold plate (below).

Do-It-Yourself Snowflake Lab

Yet it's a highly refined piece of do-it-yourself engineering inspired by the work of a research group at CalTech and another at Purdue University, led by atmospheric chemist Paul Shepson.

"It's easy to grow ice crystals. The hard and expensive part is maintaining stable conditions to control how they're growing," said Travis Knepp, a former Ph.D. student in Shepson's lab who shared advice with Gledhill when he called him up earlier this year.

"If the temperature changes by just one degree, the crystal will take on a whole other shape," he said. "He has some very nice crystals growing, and I'm really impressed with the photos."

Ten years ago Gledhill's employer threw out the chiller, so he picked it up and stashed it in his basement. "That would have been a financial hurdle. These normally cost $3,000 to $4,000," Gledhill said.

Snowflakes are stunning examples of natural beauty and testaments to the exacting laws of physics.

Thankfully, almost anyone can rapidly grow delicate ice crystals with a soda bottle, some string, a block of dry ice and a little luck. But reproducing the same crystalline growth of a snowflake, time after time after time, is a challenge typically reserved for scientists with a laboratory full of expensive equipment.

Biochemist Linden Gledhill, who works for GlaxoSmithKline by day and experiments in his photography workshop by night, has made a hobby of tackling tough natural subjects with do-it-yourself engineering. Lately he's been toying with manufacturing snowflakes in his basement.

In 2010 the Downingtown, Pennsylvania-based photographer posted his photos of natural snowflakes to Flickr, attracting the attention of Jason Tozer, a professional photographer in the UK. When Tozer asked Gledhill if he could build a snowflake-growing machine for an electronic music video, Gledhill couldn't resist.

"I'd already stalked an ice crystal research group for years when he asked, so it was an easy decision," Gledhill said. "It's incredible to see these things grow, and I wanted to pull it off myself."

Gledhill said he's not wealthy person, nor does the electronic music artist -- Ryan Teague -- have much money sitting around. So Gledhill rigged a device using tossed-out parts from work and junk from his basement, including an old electric camping cooler.

In this gallery, take a tour inside Gledhill's custom-designed icebox.

Above:

Time-Lapse Ice Crystal Growth

Gledhill said his snowflake grower could always use a few improvements, but his early time-lapse photography tests shown here are nonetheless captivating.